Composed 1881; 27 minutes
True friends do not wish one another ill health. Aleksandr Borodin, however, was not so lucky. His friends knew that the only time they could persuade him to compose was when he was ill. By profession Borodin was a chemist, a distinguished researcher and professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine and Surgery, with more than 40 published studies to his name. Music was his other great passion, but one for which he had little time.
Borodin was the youngest member of the Moguchaya kuchka—the “Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. Led by Balakirev, they sought to free Russian music from what they saw as the old-fashioned, colonial decadence of the European mainstream. The most passionate Slavophiles among them championed Russian folksong as the foundation of a new national style. Borodin followed them part of the way. While writing his First String Quartet, he helped Rimsky-Korsakov compile a collection of Russian folksongs, using one—The Song of the Sparrow Hills—as the basis of its slow movement. Yet he was not blinded by nationalism and respected the European tradition. Unlike Balakirev, he believed chamber music could evolve beyond Beethoven and Schumann: “I am deeply convinced that chamber music can make a powerful contribution to the development of musical sensibility and understanding,” he wrote.
His First Quartet (1879) was warmly received, but it was soon eclipsed by the Second, written in just two months in the summer of 1881. Borodin’s melodic gift shines as brightly here as anywhere in his music. The first movement unfolds as a love duet between cello—Borodin’s own instrument—and first violin, its buoyant main theme leading seamlessly to a lyrical second theme and a march-like variation. Dedicated to his wife Ekaterina as a 20th anniversary gift, the quartet was described by early biographers as a portrait of their love.
The brief second movement contrasts a fleeting scherzo with a sentimental waltz-like trio, ingeniously cast as a miniature sonata form. The celebrated Notturno continues the programmatic thread, its yearning melody reaching full beauty in a cello-violin canon—a tune later borrowed for Broadway’s Kismet, which posthumously earned Borodin a Tony Award in 1954. The finale opens with a rhetorical exchange between upper and lower strings, echoing Beethoven’s Op. 135, before its two themes drive vigorous counterpoint to a striking conclusion in this beautifully crafted quartet.